Tag Archives: vampires

Japan’s occasional flirtations with vampires are, like most things having to do with Japan and Western pop culture, a mix of revulsion and fascination with the foreign, a dichotomy born of the interests of the young simply not lining up ...

Recently in Heather Drain’s excellent piece on Count Yorga, Vampire, she referred to Robert Quarry’s character as a “leisure suit Lugosi,” which is a phrase I’ve been unable to get out of my head. It’s so apt because we all ...

The art of a primed and ready music compilation is a fine one. It’s akin to building the perfect party guest list. A tricky recipe that could collapse the whole shebang if you invite two or three bores who think ...

There are several inherent themes in Bram Stoker’s seminal Dracula that flow in and out of various adaptations. Themes of classism, of xenophobia and cultural ignorance and especially sexual repression. Some films highlight a couple of these ideas while ignoring ...

It’s easy to fear what you don’t understand. History is full of examples of people acting irrationally because of superstitions. The strigoi, for example, has been a target of scorn in Romania since the mid-seventeenth century. Part ghoul, part ghost, ...

I disagree vehemently with those of the opinion that the nineties was a bad decade for horror cinema. Sure, it marked somewhat of a decline in overall quality compared to the glory days of the seventies and eighties, but that ...

It is difficult for filmmakers to come up with new or original vampire stories, seeing as how it had been done and re-done so many times by about the 1960s. All the tropes have been established and adhered to: blood ...

In his book Gothic Pathologies, the critic David Punter observes that the complex, contradictory and somewhat confusing nature of adolescence is integral to gothic fiction. As a fundamentally transgressive genre, a fictional mode preoccupied with the crossing of boundaries, the ...

As part of Universal Studios’ ongoing explorations of monsters and the horror genre in the ‘30s, they soon embraced the idea of the sequel with the unexpectedly successful Bride of Frankenstein (1935), introducing a gruesome yet sympathetic female monster (Elsa ...

In the opening scene of John Carpenter’s 1998 film Vampires, a group of hunters lay siege to a vampire “nest” in remote New Mexico. A vampire surprises them and sets upon one of their men. Though heavily armed, the creature ...